Further influence
Vannevar Bush
Engineer; wartime science director · "As We May Think" (1945)
“An external, associative extension of memory.”
The idea
Bush imagined the Memex: a personal device that stored everything you knew and let you follow associative trails through it — an external, searchable extension of your own memory, decades before the personal computer.
How it shaped Orbit
He is the intellectual ancestor of the whole idea. A private memory machine that augments what one mind can hold — not to replace your thinking, but to extend it. Orbit is a small, human-scale Memex, pointed at the people in your life.
In the appThe lineage of the idea